Transportation Planning Guidelines & Tools
Transportation planning plays an important role in the ongoing development of the transportation system in British Columbia. One of its principle purposes is to link safety, mobility, and reliability performance problems along the provincial highway network to good capital improvement options, and to recommend and justify a preferred option.
Planning is the first step in the project development life cycle, generally preceding preliminary, functional, and detailed design. Planning follows a proven, systematic, and structured problem solving process to identify the worst-performing locations, to understand the root causes of problems, and to develop and evaluate a range of improvement options. All of this is summarized in a project business case and used to facilitate good decision making for capital project funding.
A number of important planning guidelines, tools, and datasets are provided for the following subject areas:
- Business Cases
- Benefit Cost Analysis
- Cost Estimating
- Highway Safety, Planning
- Highway Classification
The Capital Asset Management Framework, developed by the Ministry of Finance, describes government's objectives and policies for planning and managing publicly-funded capital assets.
Who Performs Planning
Highway planning is a key business function in the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure. Full time staff carry out planning from headquarters, the three regions, and some districts. Planning staff work closely with other business areas including engineering (design, traffic, bridge, environmental), property, rehabilitation, project management, and others.
Consulting engineers are often retained for a variety of planning services including systems, corridor, and project planning studies, project development, business case preparation, and travel demand forecasting. Consulting engineers are registered through eRISP, the electronic Registration, Identification, Selection and Performance evaluation system.
